EA to kick off GDC with Battlefield 3, Alice, Crysis 2, and more

EA plans to ride the GDC momentum with an event showing off some big-name …

The Game Developers Conference has always been a show worth covering, but the hard game news and reveals tend to take place during E3. EA is bucking the trend with a press-only event taking place the day before this year's GDC, with some big games on display. What is going to be shown?

Alice Madness Returns

Crysis 2

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

Shadows of the Damned

Battlefield Play4Free

Battlefield 3

Battlefield 3 will in fact have its own reveal event, and interviews and hands-on time are promised for the above-mentioned titles. This is a smart move: the majority of the gaming press will be in San Francisco anyway, and this is a good time to make sure everyone is writing about your titles. Plus, that's a pretty impressive list of games to put on display.

Ars will be there to cover GDC, which begins March 2, as well as the EA event taking place a day before.

I liked the first Alice game in spite of its many flaws. The aesthetic was novel, even if the story was somewhat poor and the gameplay was pretty terrible. If the sequel comes out for PC I might have to give it a try.

The next generation of Frostbite will début with Battlefield 3. DICE has confirmed that this engine is being designed to take full advantage of the DirectX 11 API and 64-bit processors.[1] As DirectX 11 is backwards compatible with DirectX 10, the engine will run using DirectX 10 hardware with some DX11-exclusive features disabled. DirectX 9 and Windows XP will not be supported.

Hummm.... guess I finally have to get rid of XP. Might have to do a hardware upgrade as well. Sandy Bridge here I come baby!

So... is Battlefield 3 going to be good, or just more of the same console-centric watered-down crap that are BF:BC, BF:BC2, and BF:1943? I want my 64+ players, team commanders, and non-regenerating health!

So... is Battlefield 3 going to be good, or just more of the same console-centric watered-down crap that are BF:BC, BF:BC2, and BF:1943? I want my 64+ players, team commanders, and non-regenerating health!

I liked the first Alice game in spite of its many flaws. The aesthetic was novel, even if the story was somewhat poor and the gameplay was pretty terrible. If the sequel comes out for PC I might have to give it a try.

Yeah agreed. I am a little weary of giving EA any more of my money, so this better be good.

EA has said that BF3 will be a true successor to BF2 and be PC centric. If it doesn't support DX9 then I think thats a pretty good clue its not coming to xbox 360

There have been hints the next real BF would also come to the consoles (this is "repi's" dream; repi being one of the lead developers who contributes to some tech forums). As for the 360, it does have a number of DX10 features, so while not compliant and definately on the low end of DX11 hardware performance, if it was the low end baseline (i.e. all features on low) it wouldn't be holding the title back.

Serious question: what is the PC hardware userbase (sub-divided by active gamers) who have hardware that exceeds what Xenos offers? If Battlefield 3 is PC-only, what will the minimum spec be? I would be surprised that the min-spec PC with features set to low at 1024x600 @ 30Hz would have more performant hardware than the Xbox 360. The reason I would be surprised is because DICE would essentially creating a major IP for a very small market base. Developing a console code base in parallel that is the "low end baseline" seems like a financially sound strategy.

The fact that Battlefield 3 is not going to be PC exclusive worries me. This is not a "master race" worry, but more of the fact that usually when games are on both the console and PC, the console is the dominant feature and the PC is usually a poor port of that. The other Battlefield games (beyond the Bad Company series) were designed for the PC in mind. I'm a bit worried that changing that will change the game.

Hoping BF3 comes out nice on xbox360/PS3 without gimping it for the PC crowd. I know the PC is going to be the definitive version, but I don't know if i'll have a capable system in time or not, all i've got is my old 360 for now.

I'm going to go against the grain here and say I'm interested in Crysis2 rather than BF3. Not that the BF series isn't great but I tend to prefer tighter gameplay (smaller teams) for my multiplayer games, with TF2/BC2/MoH/BF2 style games being more of a casual diversion at times.

Crysis2 on the other hand has me curious, I've actually grown more fond of Crysis over time, as I had a bit of an anti-hype reaction to it when it first came out. And the last 2-3 years Crytek has had a lot of very interesting tech demos (many of which have showed up on youtube) showing different camera-space rendering techniques for realtime shadows (foilage projected shadows that move realistically with the camera, ie you), global illumination/light propagation body techniques and so on. Curious to see how much of that made it into the new game, and how much of the new game has you fighting AI like the koreans in the last games (which was satisfying imo) versus aliens (which is the story arc, but also a bit less focused feeling in terms of AI/strategy in the first game.)

BATTLEFIELD!!!!! I've always loved the PC battlefield games, no one else has come close to replicating Battlefield's smooth 64-player battles and the great teamwork. We've been waiting for 6 years for Battlefield 3, so hopefully EA's not going to let us down for this one. You can bet I'll be pre-ordering the game ahead of its release

Also, @Valis - Battlefield 2 had squads of up to 6 players that people could join. Thus, you had 32 players on each side, but you could split them up into about 5 or 6 squads for tighter teamwork. VoIP only worked in the squads, and only the squad leader could directly talk to the commander. So it wasn't a massive disorganized romp like MAG

Now I first fell in love with the Battlefield franchise with BF2, however late in its life you couldn't even find a fun game anymore, no one cared about teamwork, all games were infantry only grenade spamfests with a few snipers picking off anyone else. The epic war-styled team games of its first year were long gone.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 however felt more like the early days of BF2. I played it on the 360, and had a number of personal friends and "XBL" friends who I'd regularly squad up with. People still had to use vehicles strategically since there was no host server power to turn them off, and it was much harder (and more pointless) to cheat as it was more about having fun and less about gaining some impossible number of points just to get the best rifle. Sure, less random people had their mic's on and if you were going solo, it was just another CoD/Halo fragfest, but generally I thought BC2 brought back the feelings I first felt with BF2.

Here's hoping they can pull of BF3 as a compromise between BF2 and BC2: make it playable, make it team oriented, make vehicles useful but not abuse-ful. And make it for 360, so I don't have to drop $1000 on a new PC rig.

I loved BF2:BC, so all they need to do is make that a bit less 'arcadey'. I'm hoping that destructible terrain is included.

I don't mind the level of "arcadiness" in BF2:BC. I picked it up for cheap from Steam around Christmas and have been playing a TON. I love the destructible terrain and when I get in a decent squad with two evenly matched teams it's a lot of fun. I'm excited for BF3.

I loved BF2:BC, so all they need to do is make that a bit less 'arcadey'. I'm hoping that destructible terrain is included.

I don't mind the level of "arcadiness" in BF2:BC. I picked it up for cheap from Steam around Christmas and have been playing a TON. I love the destructible terrain and when I get in a decent squad with two evenly matched teams it's a lot of fun. I'm excited for BF3.